How to change a trailer tire | Safe, simple, quick method!

On a trip across the country we experienced every RVer's worst nightmare. A flat tire while we were boondocking. Thankfully though it was a slow leak and we were able to hobble our way to a repair shop. But when we got home another tire started losing pressure. So as part of this little adventure a professional tow truck driver showed me what I think is the safest and easiest way to change a trailer tire. And now I'm going to show you how. Today I'm going to be changing a trailer tire and I've never done this before. I actually called our auto club so I could watch them do it once and learn from them. So I'm going to try and do this job with just the most basic of tools. I've got a bottle jack and a torque wrench. The story with this tire is we traveled across the entire country and back again without any major tire problems. All we had was just a valve stem that went bad and we got that fixed real quick. Then we got home parked the trailer in the driveway. I did just kind of a final check and noticed one of the tires had low pressure. Pumped it back up again checked it the next day it was low again. Realized the tire was no good. Called our RV auto club. They came out and took it off put on the spare and when we took off that tire it was actually in pretty rough shape. We should have been checking those tires a little bit better. But it was kind of hard because the part of the tire that was damaged was kind of in towards the back so it was difficult to see. So that's something to remember. Check the condition of your tires periodically especially if you're going on a long trip. My game plan for fixing this tire is going to be to put the bottle jack right underneath the axle. And this is what the tow truck operator showed me. That's actually the easiest way to raise it just enough to get the tire off without having to jack it up like crazy high. It's kind of the least risk in terms of you're only raising it just a few inches. Apparently that axle is ton strong enough to take the weight. So raise it, take off the old tire, put on the new tire, lower it down. He basically did it in five minutes. We'll see how long it takes me. Another tip the tow truck driver gave me was to make sure to loosen the bolts before you actually raise the trailer. Because once you raise it and the wheel is able to move it's going to be a lot more difficult to loosen the bolts. So now for the scary part. Time to actually jack up the trailer. I've got the jack up on a piece of wood so that it's as close to the axle as it can be. And I've also made sure to line up the little notch on the bottle jack to the axle so it's running and it has that little bit of extra resistance to keep it from slipping. Also I'm jacking in between these two metal parts so if it did actually slide one way or the other those metal parts would catch it. I also have the trailer chalked and the stabilizer feet are down. I asked the tow truck driver about this and he said best to just leave them down. It's not going to hurt them and if anything it's just going to provide more stability. So you can see now I've only jacked it up about two inches but the wheel can completely move now and I should be able to change it. No problem. In theory. Well that was easy. Almost too easy. I think we're good. I think we're gonna put that new tire on now hoping everything is gonna go smoothly. Knock on wood. Very lightly. So I really like this technique. There is another technique that a lot of people use especially while on the road is driving one of the trailer wheels up on a ramp. However our trailer the two tires at the back are really far apart so the operator that came by said that that technique would probably not work on this type of trailer. The bottle jack does really seem to be the best bet for something like this. So we've got the new tire on there. The nuts are all hand tightened. Now I've just got to let out that bottle jack and let it down real nice and smooth. It's a little bit precarious because you kind of have to go in and under but like I said the trailer's only jacked up two inches so this this is only going to come down two inches so I should be safe. Well that was a little bit scary but you could see it barely came down at all. All very gentle. All very smooth. So one of the tools that I mentioned before was having a torque wrench to make sure that you have just the amount of tightness or torque that you need on each one of those lug nuts. Thankfully our trailer actually comes with a sticker that tells you exactly how much torque to use which is 100 foot pounds. So that appears to be it. We've got a new trailer tire installed. The one thing you should note is that you need to re-tighten those lug nuts at, let's see here, at 50 miles, 100 miles, and 200 miles. Anytime you've taken off and changed a wheel you've got to make sure to re-check that torque and that tightness at those intervals. I hope you enjoyed this tire changing tutorial and if you ever need to change your trailer tire maybe this video will help you. If you found this video useful we always appreciate a like and if you could subscribe and hit that notification bell. Thank you very much and in the meantime keep on living the life you imagined. I am not an expert and I've never done this before so you may find better tutorials on how to change a trailer tire. Every RVer's worst nightmare, a tire leak or a flat tire. Let's do that again. Okay. And uh yeah I almost forgot about the spare tire. So I've actually, I'm not done yet. I've got to put that back on the back of the trailer so it's ready for when our next tire goes.